Thursday, October 28, 2010

Ni Hao, Kai-Lan birthday

Sophie's 4th birthday was in July (wow I have a four year old! When did that happen?!) and she wanted a Ni Hao, Kai-lan party. This time I went a little overboard, I'll admit. But it was super fun...and once I got the ball rolling it was hard to stop!

First I made mini milk chocolate cupcakes and piped on some red butter cream frosting. I topped them with little caramel fortune cookies that I rolled out of little caramel squares. A little tedious, but once I got a system down they went pretty quickly. The cake, frosting, caramel combination made for a really yummy treat!

Next I made rice crispy treat 'sushi' with gummy worm centers wrapped in fruit leather. This was a pretty fast and easy. The only tough part was getting the fruit leather to really stick to the rice crispy treats. Because you have to grease the pan before you spoon in the sticky crispy goop it makes the outside a bit slippery. But with a little coercing it all worked out.

Then came the actual fortune cookies. I tried making my own and failed miserably! So I bought a bag of them and got to work. First I used clean tweezers and a bobby pin to pull out the fortunes and I used the same tools to shove custom fortunes back in. They said "Xièxiè for coming to my birthday party. Love-Sophie". Then I thought they looked a bit plain so I dipped them in chocolate and threw some sprinkles on those babies! I put these in chinese food takeout boxes and slipped a pair of chopsticks under the lid. These were the goody bags for all our guests!

And here's the cake...my first shot at working with fondant. It was a two tier vanilla cake with cream cheese frosting and sliced strawberries for the filling. I made the marshmallow fondant (tastes MUCH better than the standard fondant).